Psychology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    When reading, we extract information about upcoming words before we saccade to them. Here the authors provide insights on the neural mechanisms supporting this previewing process using MEG data, and show an association between previewing effects and reading speed.

    • Yali Pan
    • , Steven Frisson
    •  & Ole Jensen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When two memories are similar, their encoding and retrieval can be disrupted by each other. Here the authors show that memory interference is resolved through abrupt remapping of activity patterns in the human hippocampal CA3 and dentate gyrus.

    • Guo Wanjia
    • , Serra E. Favila
    •  & Brice A. Kuhl

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Making a decision requires one to differentiate between choice options, committing to one and leaving the other behind. Here, the authors show that decision-making paradoxically binds options together, such that the outcome of the choice ends up changing the value of both the chosen and the unchosen options, in opposite directions.

    • Natalie Biderman
    •  & Daphna Shohamy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The willingness to exert effort into demanding tasks often declines over time through fatigue. Here the authors provide a computational account of the moment-to-moment dynamics of fatigue and its impact on effort-based choices, and reveal the neural mechanisms that underlie such computations.

    • Tanja Müller
    • , Miriam C. Klein-Flügge
    •  & Matthew A. J. Apps

  • Article
    | Open Access

    National parochialism is the tendency to cooperate more with people of the same nation. In a 42-nations study, the authors show that national parochialism is a pervasive phenomenon, present to a similar degree across all the studied nations, and occurs both when decisions are private or public.

    • Angelo Romano
    • , Matthias Sutter
    •  & Daniel Balliet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People can search for memories based on their content or context, defined as when and where they were formed. Here, the authors use direct brain recordings to provide evidence in line with the idea that separable neural systems retrieve these two types of information and predict whether recall is organized by time or content.

    • James E. Kragel
    • , Youssef Ezzyat
    •  & Michael J. Kahana

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It has been suggested that younger people care more about climate change than older people. Here, the authors present ten year panel data from New Zealand and show that despite a generation gap in starting levels, climate change beliefs have increased at similar rates across ages over the 2009-2018 period.

    • Taciano L. Milfont
    • , Elena Zubielevitch
    •  & Chris G. Sibley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People can infer unobserved causes of perceptual data (e.g. the contents of a box from the sound made by shaking it). Here the authors show that children compare what they hear with what they would have heard given other causes, and explore longer when the heard and imagined sounds are hard to discriminate.

    • Max H. Siegel
    • , Rachel W. Magid
    •  & Laura E. Schulz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors show that an integrative thinking process linked philosophically to wisdom may reduce group polarization. Specifically, wise reasoning improves intergroup attitudes and behavior even at time of heightened societal conflicts.

    • Justin P. Brienza
    • , Franki Y. H. Kung
    •  & Melody M. Chao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans consciously experience their surrounding environment and can reflect upon it. Here, the authors use single-neuron recordings, electroencephalographic recordings, and computational methods to show that both conscious experience and self-reflection are related to a common mechanism of evidence accumulation in the posterior parietal cortex.

    • Michael Pereira
    • , Pierre Megevand
    •  & Nathan Faivre

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Binding moral values help regulate social behavior in groups and interpersonal relationships. Here, the authors show that the mere presence of close others activates those values in the mind.

    • Daniel A. Yudkin
    • , Ana P. Gantman
    •  & Jordi Quoidbach

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Studying how songbirds learn songs can shed light on the development of human speech. An analysis of 160 tutor-pupil zebra finch pairs suggests that frequency dependent balanced imitation prevents the extinction of rare song elements and the overabundance of common ones, promoting song diversity within groups and species recognition across groups.

    • Ofer Tchernichovski
    • , Sophie Eisenberg-Edidin
    •  & Erich D. Jarvis

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Singleton and colleagues publish in Nature Communications an intervention study to reduce antimicrobial usage in companion animal practice. They identify significant reductions in antimicrobial usage with their more active intervention group over approximately a 6-month period. The study offers an exciting way forward to explore further the trial interventions and assess alternative methods to improve antimicrobial stewardship in veterinary practice.

    • David Brodbelt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How is neural processing adjusted when people experience uncertainty about the relevance of a stimulus feature? Here, the authors provide evidence suggesting that heightened uncertainty shifts cortical networks from a rhythmic to an asynchronous (“excited”) state and that the thalamus is central for such uncertainty-related shifts.

    • Julian Q. Kosciessa
    • , Ulman Lindenberger
    •  & Douglas D. Garrett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Making sense of the world around us often requires flexible access to information from both semantic and episodic memory systems. Here, the authors show that controlled retrieval from functionally distinct long-term memory stores is supported by shared neural processes in the human brain.

    • Deniz Vatansever
    • , Jonathan Smallwood
    •  & Elizabeth Jefferies

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this study, the authors distinguish between changes of mind about perceptual vs. intentional decisions. A Hierarchical Attractor Network Model is proposed in which human voluntary actions emerge from continuous and dynamic integration of higher-order intentions with sensory evidence and motor costs.

    • Anne Löffler
    • , Anastasia Sylaidi
    •  & Patrick Haggard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Effective use of antimicrobials in both humans and animals is essential to help slow the emergence of antimicrobial resistance. Here, Singleton et al. present a randomised controlled trial demonstrating the efficacy of social norm messaging to reduce antibiotic prescription frequency in veterinary surgeries.

    • David A. Singleton
    • , Angela Rayner
    •  & Gina L. Pinchbeck

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Little is known about people’s preferred responses to norm violations across countries. Here, in a study of 57 countries, the authors highlight cultural similarities and differences in people’s perception of the appropriateness of norm violations.

    • Kimmo Eriksson
    • , Pontus Strimling
    •  & Paul A. M. Van Lange

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite the popularity of social media, the psychological processes that drive people to engage in it remain poorly understood. The authors applied a computational modeling approach to data from multiple social media platforms to show that engagement can be explained by mechanisms of reward learning.

    • Björn Lindström
    • , Martin Bellander
    •  & David M. Amodio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People only exert cognitive effort if they think the benefits outweigh the costs. Here, the authors show that people assess these benefits by considering expected rewards and how much their effort matters for obtaining those rewards, and then integrating these to determine how much effort to exert.

    • R. Frömer
    • , H. Lin
    •  & A. Shenhav

  • Article
    | Open Access

    While size exaggeration is common in the animal kingdom, Pisanski & Reby show that human listeners can detect deceptive vocal signals of people trying to sound bigger or smaller, and recalibrate their estimates accordingly, especially men judging the heights of other men, with implications for the evolution of vocal communication.

    • Katarzyna Pisanski
    •  & David Reby

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Performance on a cognitive reflection test correlates with a wide range of behaviours in survey studies. Here the authors investigate the relationship between cognitive reflection and some aspects of actual behaviour on social media.

    • Mohsen Mosleh
    • , Gordon Pennycook
    •  & David G. Rand

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The study reports that implicitly learned, statistically defined chunks of abstract visual shapes elicit similar object-based perceptual effects as images of true objects with visual boundaries do. This result links the emergence of object representations to implicit statistical learning mechanisms.

    • Gábor Lengyel
    • , Márton Nagy
    •  & József Fiser

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are multiple methods of clearing one’s mind of current thoughts. Here the authors use fMRI decoding to confirm the successful clearing of minds using different strategies, and show that these strategies have distinct neural signatures.

    • Hyojeong Kim
    • , Harry R. Smolker
    •  & Jarrod A. Lewis-Peacock

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When data is scant, logical reasoning can lead to knowledge acquisition by disclosing evidence otherwise not available. Here, the authors show that this logical route to knowledge is available to preverbal infants and can help them learn about the social world.

    • Nicolò Cesana-Arlotti
    • , Ágnes Melinda Kovács
    •  & Ernő Téglás

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether the brain processes different types of pain similarly or differently remains unknown. The authors show that an established neurologic pain signature responds to five different types of visceral and somatic pain; they also develop a new classifier that reliably discriminates between both pain modalities.

    • Lukas Van Oudenhove
    • , Philip A. Kragel
    •  & Tor D. Wager

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Theories of human categorization have traditionally been evaluated in the context of simple, low-dimensional stimuli. In this work, the authors use a large dataset of human behavior over 10,000 natural images to re-evaluate these theories, revealing interesting differences from previous results.

    • Ruairidh M. Battleday
    • , Joshua C. Peterson
    •  & Thomas L. Griffiths

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous research on the importance of prosociality is based on observations from WEIRD societies, questioning the generalizability of these findings. Here the authors present a global investigation of the relation between prosociality and labor market success and generalize the positive relation to a wide geographical context.

    • Fabian Kosse
    •  & Michela M. Tincani

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